Cancer Screening Overview (PDQ®)–Health Professional Version

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Changes to This Summary (12/06/2018)

The PDQ cancer information summaries are reviewed regularly and updated as new information becomes available. This section describes the latest changes made to this summary as of the date above.

Cancer Screening

Revised text to state that overdiagnosis, or the identification of a low-risk cancer that would not have significant health consequences in a patient's lifetime, is a documented harm from screening.

Added Cancer Recurrence as a new subsection.

Added text to state that uncertainty in an estimated odds ratio (OR), or relative risk (RR), is sometimes presented as a confidence interval (CI), which represents the range of values for the OR (or RR) that is plausible based on the observed study data; if the CI range contains 1, it indicates that the observed data would not be unusual if the two groups truly do not differ in their odds (or risk) of experiencing the event.

This summary is written and maintained by the PDQ Screening and Prevention Editorial Board, which is editorially independent of NCI. The summary reflects an independent review of the literature and does not represent a policy statement of NCI or NIH. More information about summary policies and the role of the PDQ Editorial Boards in maintaining the PDQ summaries can be found on the About This PDQ Summary and PDQ® - NCI's Comprehensive Cancer Database pages.

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